The entry begins:While writing my Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, I had some specific actors in mind – Katherine Hepburn for Joheved, Fred Astaire for her husband Meir, Olivia de Havilland for Miriam, Timothy Dalton as her husband Judah, and Elizabeth Taylor for Rachel. When I told my daughter, then in her twenties, about my choices, she protested that they were all dead, to which I replied that my characters, who lived in 11th-century France, had been dead even longer.Visit Maggie Anton's website and blog.
However for Enchantress, and its prequel Apprentice, I wrote without any preconceived actors in mind. It was only when the novels were done that I started to imagine who might play them in a modern movie. This time I limited myself to living actors, with their being Jewish a bonus. The tricky part was that the story takes place over a 60-year time period in 4th-century Babylonia, so I allowed myself to consider older actors, knowing how they’d looked in their youth.
I had created my heroine, Dodi, as the model for a mosaic portrait known as the “Mona Lisa of the Galilee,” so the actress would need to bear a decent likeness to this. She also would need to play a woman who was not only intelligent and passionate, but a talented sorceress. My choice: Natalie Portman.
For Dodi’s first husband...[read on]
Writers Read: Maggie Anton (December 2009).
My Book, The Movie: Enchantress.
--Marshal Zeringue
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